OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning A Simulation-based Visual Policy for Real-world Peg In Unseen Holes
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper proposes a learning-based visual peg-in-hole that enables training with several shapes in simulation, and adapting to arbitrary unseen shapes in real world with minimal sim-to-real cost. The core idea is to decouple the generalization of the sensory-motor policy to the design of a fast-adaptable perception module and a simulated generic policy module. The framework consists of a segmentation network (SN), a virtual sensor network (VSN), and a controller network (CN). Concretely, the VSN is trained to measure the pose of the unseen shape from a segmented image. After that, given the shape-agnostic pose measurement, the CN is trained to achieve generic peg-in-hole. Finally, when applying to real unseen holes, we only have to fine-tune the SN required by the simulated VSN+CN. To further minimize the transfer cost, we propose to automatically collect and annotate the data for the SN after one-minute human teaching. Simulated and real-world results are presented under the configurations of eye-to/in-hand. An electric vehicle charging system with the proposed policy inside achieves a 10/10 success rate in 2-3s, using only hundreds of auto-labeled samples for the SN transfer.
Integrating Social Media into the Design Process
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Social media captures examples of people's behaviors, actions, beliefs, and sentiments. As a result, it can be a valuable source of information and inspiration for HCI research and design. Social media technologies can improve, inform, and strengthen insights to better understand and represent user populations. To understand the position of social media research and analysis in the design process, this paper seeks to highlight shortcomings of using traditional research methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups) that ignore or don't adequately reflect relevant social media, and this paper speculates about the importance and benefits of leveraging social media for establishing context in supplement with these methods. We present examples that guide our thinking and introduce discussion around concerns related to using social media data.
Making ProB compatible with SWI-Prolog
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2022
Year: 2022

Even though the core of the Prolog programming language has been standardized by ISO since 1995, it remains difficult to write complex Prolog programs that can run unmodified on multiple Prolog implementations. Indeed, implementations sometimes deviate from the ISO standard and the standard itself fails to cover many features that are essential in practice. Most Prolog applications thus have to rely on non-standard features, often making them dependent on one particular Prolog implementation and incompatible with others. We examine one such Prolog application: ProB, which has been developed for over 20 years in SICStus Prolog. The article describes how we managed to refactor the codebase of ProB to also support SWI-Prolog, with the goal of verifying ProB's results using two independent toolchains. This required a multitude of adjustments, ranging from extending the SICStus emulation in SWI-Prolog on to better modularizing the monolithic ProB codebase. We also describe notable compatibility issues and other differences that we encountered in the process, and how we were able to deal with them with few major code changes. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
Performance Analysis of Cascaded Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have been presented as a solution to realize the concept of smart radio environments, wherein uninterrupted coverage and extremely high quality of service can be ensured. In this paper, assuming that multiple RIS are deployed in the propagation environment, the performance of a cascaded RIS network affected by imperfect phase estimation is evaluated. Specifically, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability, the ergodic capacity and the average symbol error probability that can be utilized to evaluate the coverage of the proposed network, as well as the average capacity and the data transmission accuracy. Finally, we validate the derived expressions through simulations and show that by choosing the number of the participating RIS correctly, a cascaded RIS network can outperform a single RIS aided system and extend the network's coverage efficiently.
Behind the Mask: Demographic bias in name detection for PII masking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Many datasets contain personally identifiable information, or PII, which poses privacy risks to individuals. PII masking is commonly used to redact personal information such as names, addresses, and phone numbers from text data. Most modern PII masking pipelines involve machine learning algorithms. However, these systems may vary in performance, such that individuals from particular demographic groups bear a higher risk for having their personal information exposed. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three off-the-shelf PII masking systems on name detection and redaction. We generate data using names and templates from the customer service domain. We find that an open-source RoBERTa-based system shows fewer disparities than the commercial models we test. However, all systems demonstrate significant differences in error rate based on demographics. In particular, the highest error rates occurred for names associated with Black and Asian/Pacific Islander individuals.
Towards a multi-stakeholder value-based assessment framework for algorithmic systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In an effort to regulate Machine Learning-driven (ML) systems, current auditing processes mostly focus on detecting harmful algorithmic biases. While these strategies have proven to be impactful, some values outlined in documents dealing with ethics in ML-driven systems are still underrepresented in auditing processes. Such unaddressed values mainly deal with contextual factors that cannot be easily quantified. In this paper, we develop a value-based assessment framework that is not limited to bias auditing and that covers prominent ethical principles for algorithmic systems. Our framework presents a circular arrangement of values with two bipolar dimensions that make common motivations and potential tensions explicit. In order to operationalize these high-level principles, values are then broken down into specific criteria and their manifestations. However, some of these value-specific criteria are mutually exclusive and require negotiation. As opposed to some other auditing frameworks that merely rely on ML researchers' and practitioners' input, we argue that it is necessary to include stakeholders that present diverse standpoints to systematically negotiate and consolidate value and criteria tensions. To that end, we map stakeholders with different insight needs, and assign tailored means for communicating value manifestations to them. We, therefore, contribute to current ML auditing practices with an assessment framework that visualizes closeness and tensions between values and we give guidelines on how to operationalize them, while opening up the evaluation and deliberation process to a wide range of stakeholders.
On Nested Justification Systems (full version)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Justification theory is a general framework for the definition of semantics of rule-based languages that has a high explanatory potential. Nested justification systems, first introduced by Denecker et al. (2015), allow for the composition of justification systems. This notion of nesting thus enables the modular definition of semantics of rule-based languages, and increases the representational capacities of justification theory. As we show in this paper, the original semantics for nested justification systems lead to the loss of information relevant for explanations. In view of this problem, we provide an alternative characterization of semantics of nested justification systems and show that this characterization is equivalent to the original semantics. Furthermore, we show how nested justification systems allow representing fixpoint definitions (Hou and Denecker 2009).
The Compound Information Bottleneck Outlook
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We formulate and analyze the compound information bottleneck programming. In this problem, a Markov chain $ \mathsf{X} \rightarrow \mathsf{Y} \rightarrow \mathsf{Z} $ is assumed with fixed marginal distributions $\mathsf{P}_{\mathsf{X}}$ and $\mathsf{P}_{\mathsf{Y}}$, and the mutual information between $ \mathsf{X} $ and $ \mathsf{Z} $ is sought to be maximized over the choice of conditional probability of $\mathsf{Z}$ given $\mathsf{Y}$ from a given class, under the \textit{worst choice} of the joint probability of the pair $(\mathsf{X},\mathsf{Y})$ from a different class. We consider several classes based on extremes of: mutual information; minimal correlation; total variation; and the relative entropy class. We provide values, bounds, and various characterizations for specific instances of this problem: the binary symmetric case, the scalar Gaussian case, the vector Gaussian case and the symmetric modulo-additive case. Finally, for the general case, we propose a Blahut-Arimoto type of alternating iterations algorithm to find a consistent solution to this problem.
Towards Optimal VPU Compiler Cost Modeling by using Neural Networks to Infer Hardware Performances
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Calculating the most efficient schedule of work in a neural network compiler is a difficult task. There are many parameters to be accounted for that can positively or adversely affect that schedule depending on their configuration - How work is shared between distributed targets, the subdivision of tensors to fit in memory, toggling the enablement of optimizations, etc. Traditionally, neural network compilers determine how to set these values by building a graph of choices and choosing the path with minimal 'cost'. These choices and their corresponding costs are usually determined by an algorithm crafted by engineers with a deep knowledge of the target platform. However, when the amount of options available to a compiler is large, it is very difficult to ensure that these models consistently produce an optimal schedule for all scenarios, whilst still completing compilation in an acceptable timeframe. This paper presents 'VPUNN' - a neural network-based cost model trained on low-level task profiling that consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art cost modeling in Intel's line of VPU processors.
Galois theory for analogical classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Analogical proportions are 4-ary relations that read "A is to B as C is to D". Recent works have highlighted the fact that such relations can support a specific form of inference, called analogical inference. This inference mechanism was empirically proved to be efficient in several reasoning and classification tasks. In the latter case, it relies on the notion of analogy preservation. In this paper, we explore this relation between formal models of analogy and the corresponding classes of analogy preserving functions, and we establish a Galois theory of analogical classifiers. We illustrate the usefulness of this Galois framework over Boolean domains, and we explicitly determine the closed sets of analogical classifiers, i.e., classifiers that are compatible with the analogical inference, for each pair of Boolean analogies.
CoDo: Contrastive Learning with Downstream Background Invariance for Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The prior self-supervised learning researches mainly select image-level instance discrimination as pretext task. It achieves a fantastic classification performance that is comparable to supervised learning methods. However, with degraded transfer performance on downstream tasks such as object detection. To bridge the performance gap, we propose a novel object-level self-supervised learning method, called Contrastive learning with Downstream background invariance (CoDo). The pretext task is converted to focus on instance location modeling for various backgrounds, especially for downstream datasets. The ability of background invariance is considered vital for object detection. Firstly, a data augmentation strategy is proposed to paste the instances onto background images, and then jitter the bounding box to involve background information. Secondly, we implement architecture alignment between our pretraining network and the mainstream detection pipelines. Thirdly, hierarchical and multi views contrastive learning is designed to improve performance of visual representation learning. Experiments on MSCOCO demonstrate that the proposed CoDo with common backbones, ResNet50-FPN, yields strong transfer learning results for object detection.
Edge Connectivity Augmentation in Near-Linear Time
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We give an $\tilde{O}(m)$-time algorithm for the edge connectivity augmentation problem and the closely related edge splitting-off problem. This is optimal up to lower order terms and closes the long line of work on these problems.
DNS based In-Browser Cryptojacking Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The metadata aspect of Domain Names (DNs) enables us to perform a behavioral study of DNs and detect if a DN is involved in in-browser cryptojacking. Thus, we are motivated to study different temporal and behavioral aspects of DNs involved in cryptojacking. We use temporal features such as query frequency and query burst along with graph-based features such as degree and diameter, and non-temporal features such as the string-based to detect if a DNs is suspect to be involved in the in-browser cryptojacking. Then, we use them to train the Machine Learning (ML) algorithms over different temporal granularities such as 2 hours datasets and complete dataset. Our results show DecisionTrees classifier performs the best with 59.5% Recall on cryptojacked DN, while for unsupervised learning, K-Means with K=2 perform the best. Similarity analysis of the features reveals a minimal divergence between the cryptojacking DNs and other already known malicious DNs. It also reveals the need for improvements in the feature set of state-of-the-art methods to improve their accuracy in detecting in-browser cryptojacking. As added analysis, our signature-based analysis identifies that none-of-the Indian Government websites were involved in cryptojacking during October-December 2021. However, based on the resource utilization, we identify 10 DNs with different properties than others.
PaCHash: Packed and Compressed Hash Tables
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce PaCHash, a hash table that stores its objects contiguously in an array without intervening space, even if the objects have variable size. In particular, each object can be compressed using standard compression techniques. A small search data structure allows locating the objects in constant expected time. PaCHash is most naturally described as a static external hash table where it needs a constant number of bits of internal memory per block of external memory. Here, in some sense, PaCHash beats a lower bound on the space consumption of k-perfect hashing. An implementation for fast SSDs needs about 5 bits of internal memory per block of external memory, requires only one disk access (of variable length) per search operation, and has small internal search overhead compared to the disk access cost. Our experiments show that it has lower space consumption than all previous approaches even when considering objects of identical size.
A spatial-temporal short-term traffic flow prediction model based on dynamical-learning graph convolution mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Short-term traffic flow prediction is a vital branch of the Intelligent Traffic System (ITS) and plays an important role in traffic management. Graph convolution network (GCN) is widely used in traffic prediction models to better deal with the graphical structure data of road networks. However, the influence weights among different road sections are usually distinct in real life, and hard to be manually analyzed. Traditional GCN mechanism, relying on manually-set adjacency matrix, is unable to dynamically learn such spatial pattern during the training. To deal with this drawback, this paper proposes a novel location graph convolutional network (Location-GCN). Location-GCN solves this problem by adding a new learnable matrix into the GCN mechanism, using the absolute value of this matrix to represent the distinct influence levels among different nodes. Then, long short-term memory (LSTM) is employed in the proposed traffic prediction model. Moreover, Trigonometric function encoding is used in this study to enable the short-term input sequence to convey the long-term periodical information. Ultimately, the proposed model is compared with the baseline models and evaluated on two real word traffic flow datasets. The results show our model is more accurate and robust on both datasets than other representative traffic prediction models.
Vibration-based communication for deafblind people
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Deafblind people have both hearing and visual impairments, which makes communication with other people often dependent on expensive technologies e.g., Braille displays, or on caregivers acting as interpreters. This paper presents Morse I/O (MIO), a vibrotactile interface for Android, evaluated through experiments and interviews with deafblind participants. MIO was shown to enable consistent text entry and recognition after only a few hours of practice. The participants were willing to continue using the interface, although there were perceived difficulties in learning to use it. Overall, MIO is a cost-effective, portable interface for deafblind people without access to Braille displays or similar.
Weisfeiler-Leman Invariant Promise Valued CSPs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In a recent line of work, Butti and Dalmau have shown that a fixed-template Constraint Satisfaction Problem is solvable by a certain natural linear programming relaxation (equivalent to the basic linear programming relaxation) if and only if it is solvable on a certain distributed network, and this happens if and only if its set of Yes instances is closed under Weisfeiler-Leman equivalence. We generalize this result to the much broader framework of fixed-template Promise Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problems. Moreover, we show that two commonly used linear programming relaxations are no longer equivalent in this broader framework.
THOR: Threshold-Based Ranking Loss for Ordinal Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we present a regression-based ordinal regression algorithm for supervised classification of instances into ordinal categories. In contrast to previous methods, in this work the decision boundaries between categories are predefined, and the algorithm learns to project the input examples onto their appropriate scores according to these predefined boundaries. This is achieved by adding a novel threshold-based pairwise loss function that aims at minimizing the regression error, which in turn minimizes the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) measure. We implemented our proposed architecture-agnostic method using the CNN-framework for feature extraction. Experimental results on five real-world benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the best MAE results compared to state-of-the-art ordinal regression algorithms.
Bounds for Privacy-Utility Trade-off with Per-letter Privacy Constraints and Non-zero Leakage
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

An information theoretic privacy mechanism design problem for two scenarios is studied where the private data is either hidden or observable. In each scenario, privacy leakage constraints are considered using two different measures. In these scenarios the private data is hidden or observable. In the first scenario, an agent observes useful data $Y$ that is correlated with private data $X$, and wishes to disclose the useful information to a user. A privacy mechanism is designed to generate disclosed data $U$ which maximizes the revealed information about $Y$ while satisfying a per-letter privacy constraint. In the second scenario, the agent has additionally access to the private data. First, the Functional Representation Lemma and Strong Functional Representation Lemma are extended by relaxing the independence condition to find a lower bound considering the second scenario. Next, lower bounds as well as upper bounds on privacy-utility trade-off are derived for both scenarios. In particular, for the case where $X$ is deterministic function of $Y$, we show that our upper and lower bounds are asymptotically optimal considering the first scenario.
Identical Image Retrieval using Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years, we know that the interaction with images has increased. Image similarity involves fetching similar-looking images abiding by a given reference image. The target is to find out whether the image searched as a query can result in similar pictures. We are using the BigTransfer Model, which is a state-of-art model itself. BigTransfer(BiT) is essentially a ResNet but pre-trained on a larger dataset like ImageNet and ImageNet-21k with additional modifications. Using the fine-tuned pre-trained Convolution Neural Network Model, we extract the key features and train on the K-Nearest Neighbor model to obtain the nearest neighbor. The application of our model is to find similar images, which are hard to achieve through text queries within a low inference time. We analyse the benchmark of our model based on this application.
Transformer-based Cross-Modal Recipe Embeddings with Large Batch Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present a cross-modal recipe retrieval framework, Transformer-based Network for Large Batch Training (TNLBT), which is inspired by ACME~(Adversarial Cross-Modal Embedding) and H-T~(Hierarchical Transformer). TNLBT aims to accomplish retrieval tasks while generating images from recipe embeddings. We apply the Hierarchical Transformer-based recipe text encoder, the Vision Transformer~(ViT)-based recipe image encoder, and an adversarial network architecture to enable better cross-modal embedding learning for recipe texts and images. In addition, we use self-supervised learning to exploit the rich information in the recipe texts having no corresponding images. Since contrastive learning could benefit from a larger batch size according to the recent literature on self-supervised learning, we adopt a large batch size during training and have validated its effectiveness. In the experiments, the proposed framework significantly outperformed the current state-of-the-art frameworks in both cross-modal recipe retrieval and image generation tasks on the benchmark Recipe1M. This is the first work which confirmed the effectiveness of large batch training on cross-modal recipe embeddings.